The world of business is cutthroat and even the biggest businessmen are not immune to losses, but there a few unfortunate cases where a billionaire, once counted among richest men in the world, went bankrupt and had to depend on his wife and kids for daily expenses. The man we are talking about is Pramod Mittal, the brother of steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, who was declared bankrupt in 2020 after paying 2.5 billion pounds (around Rs 24,000 crore at the time) to his creditors.
Pramod Mittal, once among the richest men in the United Kingdom (UK), is the brother of billionaire steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal. The 68-year-old, who once spent Rs 550 crore on his daughter’s wedding, was declared bankrupt in 2020 by London’s Insolvency and Company Court, with a loan of over 130 million pounds to his name.
Pramod Mittal had declared a loan of 2,549,089,370 pounds, which included his father’s debt of over 170 million pounds. In his bankruptcy filing, Mittal claimed that he had no person income and the only property to his name at the time was worth a mere 45 pounds in Delhi,
According to a report at the time, Pramod Mittal that his monthly personal expenses of around 2,000 to 3,000 pounds were being met by his wife, and he had borrowed money from his family– 1.1 million pounds from his wife Sangeeta, 2.4 million pounds from his son Divyesh and 1.1 million pounds from his brother-in-law Amit Lohiya– to pay back his creditors.
Mittal was offering his creditors to pay just 0.18 paise in exchange of every one pound of loan taken by him, the report had said.
Pramod Mittal’s downfall began with one critical decision when he became the guarantor for a loan taken by GIKIL — a metallurgical company based in Bosnia, of which he was the co-owner and head of the company’s supervisory board. In 2013, the company was unable to repay the $166 million loan, following which Pramod Mittal, was forced to clear the debt, which set him on the path to bankruptcy.
However, the worse was yet to come as Pramod Mittal, along with two other GIKIL officials, were arrested in Bosnia in 2019 on charges of fraud. A year later, in 2020, he was declared bankrupt in the UK and declared that he had zero income and relied on his wife and children to pay his daily expenses.
Additionally, Pramod Mittal also faces money laundering charges in India in an alleged Rs 2,200 crore fraud State Trading Corporation (STC). Mittal is accused of ‘criminal breach of trust’ as he failed to make payments as per the terms of the agreement with STC.
It is surreal to think Pramod Mittal once spent a whopping Rs 550 crore on the wedding of his daughter Shrishti Mittal, who got married to Gulraj Behl, a Dutch-Indian investment banker, in Barcelona, Spain, in 2013.
Notably, Pramod Mittal had spent around 10 million pounds more than what his elder brother Lakshmi Mittal spent on his own daughter Vanisha Mittal’s wedding in 2004.
In 2004, two decades before the Anant-Radhika lavish wedding, the marriage of Vanisha Mittal — the daughter of India’s steel magnate, Lakshmi Mittal — with British-Indian businessman Amit Bhatia, was etched into the record books for being the most expensive wedding in the world at the time.
The Vanisha Mittal-Amit Bhatia wedding is said to have cost over Rs 240 crore with celebrations lasting for six days.
